SaaS Customer Success, Analysis, and Communication Blog

The phrase "customer delight" is bullshit. A decent barometer for bullshit is a Google Images SERP:

These results read more like Six Sigma and supply chain analysis than anything useful - much less anything a customer would care about. What a bunch of business drivel. It's a good sign that a business phrase has jumped the shark when a GIS page looks like this. Such depression.

Why Is Customer Delight Bullshit? I'll Tell You.

1. In reality, customers value speed and accuracy

For most businesses, you're not in the business of delight. I suppose some are - flower companies, massage parlors, and private jet shares - but most are in the business of trading money for products and services. Especially for B2B companies but really for most businesses out there, delight is far less important than speed and accuracy.

2. In reality, customers value completeness and context

Completeness of service seems like a no-brainer, but is actually a significant and consistent challenge in providing customer service and support. Ensuring that every single interaction is 100% complete is a personal (and somewhat maniacal, for those that work with me) obsession. How to ensure that a team comes close to that 100% mark is a whole blog post itself, but suffice to say that as a business grows and scales, this becomes increasingly difficult.

A big part of the "completeness" feeling for customers is pulling context to every customer service action. If you can solve a problem within the context of a customer's broader experience, it feels more complete to the customer, and you probably just headed off the next question, too. This means not providing simply an answer, but taking the time to understand an individual customer's context and provide solutions that are complete within the context the customer is currently experiencing.

3. In reality, customers value consistency of service and brand

For many companies, especially in competitive markets, customers engage with your business at least partially due to brand. Unpacking "brand" is kind of a mess, but let's leave it as "how you present yourself to the world online, through your product, and through your people". If your brand is spunky and fun, and your service is outsourced boredom, it's inconsistent. Keeping your service on-brand again helps to contextualize the experience and reinforces the values that caused a customer to originally purchase from you.

Consistency of service seems like a simple observation. It is. But again, in reality, it's really, really hard at scale. Hitting 100% of the goal 100% of the time across tens of thousands of interactions isn't possible - but customers require it to be satisfied. They expect consistency, and will become advocates if you're delivering speedy, accurate, complete service as a standard practice.

4. For businesses, manufactured delight is passe

Every customer-facing person in the past 10 years has read Tony Hsieh's seminal modern-day customer-service book Delivering Happiness. It's a tremendous read. Unfortunately, the service industry has an obsession with the notes on "manufactured delight" wherein a company deliberately creates an experience that is designed to delight a small fraction of its customer base. There's a lot of other good stuff in the book, but people tend to take away the examples about deliberately creating "delightful mishaps".

While manufactured delight can lead to great press, it's not much of a customer generation or retention strategy in practice. And if you've ever ordered or called Zappos, you know that the foundation of their customer team isn't the one-off manufactured happiness - it's the consistent delivery of quick, accurate, and on-brand product and service day-in and day-out.

Concrete Steps to "Customer Delight" You Can Start Today

Here it is, the secret formula, guys:

Step 1. Consistently deliver fast, accurate, complete service that is on-brand and natural. Solve for the customer like crazy.

Step 2. Profit.

Step 3. There is no step 3. Just focus maniacally on step 1 and you will produce "customer delight".

A little proof: I had a good morning today at HubSpot and saw some customer delight in the wild, from a HubSpot (where I work) customer. We didn't do anything abnormal here, other than insane focus on details per the above:

Mike, I have two points of disagreement with you here. If you do unpack Brand, you'll find that a lot of what goes into is -- and always has been, though we didn't call it such -- "Customer Delight." I'm as adverse to nonsensical business speak as the next guy, so I dug in a little bit to see what "Customer Delight" is really supposed to mean. In all the materials I came across, from pithy to academic, "Customer Delight" seems to be a term for increasing willingness-to-pay by exceeding expectations. And isn't that what really drives the calculation of Brand Equity on every balance sheet. For me, I can't really separate "Customer Delight" from Brand Equity.
Totally agree that manufactured delight is garbage. But this is because, when you try to scale an experience of exceeding expectations, it soon becomes... an expectation. You've run out of room to add any value here. That all said, businesses have to find ways to exceed expectations where and whenever feasible (feasibility being key). Otherwise they run the risk of being the second widget maker form the left, a commoditized business. And from there, it's a cost-cutting war until you competitors, or you, go out of business. That's why successful businesses strive to exceed the expectations set on Main Street, Wall Street or anywhere.

Thanks for the comment matt!
For what it's worth, I could see "retention target: $1,000,000" as a part of what "brand" unpacks to on a balance sheet, among other line items. However, I wouldn't expect to see "brand equity: $8,000,000" there. That'd be weird to me. I think you're right that "brand" unpacks into various measures, though, many of them being growth-oriented.
Your second paragraph is accurate on competitive eventualities, but I think that consistently meeting expectations *is* exceeding other companies' reality, and manufacturing delight *is* a cop-out in place of consistent excellence. It's simply incredibly hard to be 100% good 100% of the time. Most companies, as you point out, punt on it. Just by not punting on it - despite cost cutting and other pressures - really separates you from the pack.

Matthew Wainwright

Mike,
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Dunno why my brain was so insistent on using "Brand Equity." I guess I was fixated on bringing more jargon into the discussion. What I really should have said was "the inclusion of 'brands,' as intangible assets or goodwill, on a balance sheet." Something like that. Point being, there's been a lot of work to turn this fuzziness into economically measurable value.
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I guess the second part varies depending on whether you are talking about consumer markets (B2C) or industrial markets (B2B). My perspective being more relevant to the former and yours to the latter.

A lot of this is coming from time spent in the business school library... but let me see what I can find.
How to Delight Your Customers - http://appli7.hec.fr/emba/notes/upload/HowToDelightYourCustomers.pdf (doing the math on the example on page 11 here, a 'delighted' customer was worth 1.44x to Mercedes-Benz as a satisfied customer)
Brand Valuation: The financial value of brands - http://www.brandchannel.com/papers_review.asp?sp_id=357 (addresses brand as an intangible asset... again I misspoke in my original comment)
Consumer Company Identification - http://smgpublish.bu.edu/cb/JM2003.pdf (show how going beyond simply fulfilling needs [aka customer delight] creates effective brand advocates in B2C)

The concept of "customer delight" -- at least as you frame it here -- is analogous to what I've always thought of as the "grand gesture" school of romance. If you've ever dated a Grand Gesture adherent, you know what I mean. It's when somebody is far more willing to (occasionally and sporadically) go above and beyond in some hyperbolic, overly splashy way (singing sappy love songs outside your window at night, filling up your apartment with a billion rose petals, racing through a crowded airport for a heartfelt appeal, etc etc etc), usually as a way of overcompensating for some larger failure to fulfill the basic, day-to-day requirements of a good, solid, fulfilling relationship. Relationships aren't nourished by Grand Gestures, they're nourished by the unglamorous daily toil of suiting up and showing up for whatever murky situation that day happens to bring. This is true in business and in life. Blame Tony Hsieh for an overemphasis on Grand Gestures in customer service, if you like, blame romcoms for the rest, I guess. Or blame human laziness. It's just easier to go over the top from time to time (and usually only Just In Time) than to put in the work every single day.
To be fair, there' s nothing wrong with the grand gesture when it comes ON TOP of a solid foundation of consistent daily effort. The grand gesture can be a lovely surprise, when it's done right. It just needs to be merely the cherry on top -- not the whole dang meal.

Excellent post, Redbord!
At the company meeting today, Halligan played a nice call-in to your support department which speaks volumes to what you and your team do on a daily basis. It's a true example of "customer delight."
Keep up the great work

That was a cool moment :) Glad you're digging the ol' brand of every-day-customer-delight!

Katie

+1 to Ryan's comment--it makes me really proud to work at HubSpot when I hear your team empowering customers to transform their business. Congrats to you and the whole team for such a shining example of how to SFTC--you guys rock.

I have personally been a recipient of your form of customer delight with the HubSpot support team. They just solve the problem, fast, and with a smile. They don't stop until the issue is resolved and many times feels like they go way out of their job description. This is the key. You have owned it. Bravo.